Fragmentation of service provision will make it harder than ever to check on value for money, Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge told the CIPFA conference this morning.
She said CIPFA members’ skills would be essential to help keep track of spending through a myriad of health foundation trusts, free schools, police commissioners and other providers.‘Your role is hugely important now in following the pound and ensuring value for money,’ Hodge said. ‘There are not enough qualified finance professionals [in government] and their role is not sufficiently valued.
‘We need you to be at the heart of work in the public sector to ensure value for money. Our job is to follow the money and your job is to help us.’
As an example of how fragmented service provision made the committee’s job harder, she said: ‘The PAC cannot talk to 160 foundation trusts and do the job effectively.’
Establishing value for money would be further hampered by the abolition of the Audit Commission, a move she said had been made ‘with not enough consideration’.
Hodge pointed out that the National Audit Office had been set up to deal with large government departments, and would need to ‘go through transformation’ to replace the commission’s value for money work among smaller organisations.
Hodge is the PAC’s first elected and first female chair. She said the committee had traditionally held ‘confrontational’ hearings, but she wanted to move towards ‘more constructive dialogue’ with senior civil servants. She also wanted to review issues such as the Private Finance Initiative and procurement on a pan-government basis rather than in departmental ‘silos’ and to ensure that findings were acted on.
Government departments had been slow to learn lessons form earlier spending fiascos, Hodge said: ‘Too many of our reports deal with huge waste. FireControl was half a billion pounds down the drain creating white elephants and that was not atypical.
‘The aircraft carrier project has started to go wrong and the government has not a clue whether what it now wants to do is technically possible, and it may be another MoD total disaster. The IT system for the NHS was £2.5bn down the drain for very little.’
